SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus (COVID-19)

Something tells me you couldn't come back...even if you wanted to.

 

germany is going to one week quarantines

i suspect this country and some others are going to have to live with this. we'll probably need more field hospitals, line 'em up and move 'em out.

i feel bad for the people who get stuck in a hospital hallway through no fault of their own

 

i don't think it has been implemented yet. head honcho thinks 2 weeks is unnecessary, and they will get more compliancy with one

very sad down there. kind of a usa without the medical system. probably what some of our inner cities and rural areas would look like if you expanded the numbers

 

Mister Google shows respiratory things like pneumonia & the flu are way down due to the mask-wearing & sanitizing & such. Good to find a bright side

My grandfather, technically died of respiratory issues but his brain function went WAY down from much lack of oxygen during that failure. Actual brain damage causes should be thoroughly covered in any study linking brain issues to covid-19 - especially in light of degraded air intake. Brains don't respond well to lack of oxygen.
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i've always been a germaphobe, and cosequently abhor handshaking. i like the asian bow with facemask

 

acknowledgement - the 1st step to cure

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Rebreathing your CO2 due to wearing a mask for long periods of time at work cannot be too health either.

 

there's a report out, n95 shoud be removed once in awhile, cloth masks can be worn for any length of time, even when exercising

reuters: 'top italian doctor says coronavirus is virtually finished in italy, does not expect a second wave'

 

Per Johns Hopkins, the Italy daily new cases, has seen an order of magnitude reduction from 3/21/20 at ~6,600 to 5/31/20 at 330. To be more precise, I would have said, "Less bad" for the 60.4 million.

Bob Wilson

 

I wonder what the underlying strategy is with the different approaches to this pandemic. The obvious ones:
1) Stamp it out by lock down until the spread is way less than 0.5, (there is a techo term but can't think of it for the moment but it's the number of new infections spread within the community by a single carrier).
2) Build up herd immunity by setting up field hospitals to treat those that can be saved to provide plasma anti bodies to treat the next wave etc
3) Reduce the herd by culling off the weaker ones so the remaining herd is stronger and less of a strain on the health system and govt financial support so for a short term hit a much stronger workforce emerges at the other side.

The ones that are not so obvious could be denialists, those who hope to profiteer in some way at the expense of others by buying up equipment and drugs and reselling them at a huge profit and those that simply don't care about anything else but the financial viability of the country they are in charge of getting back on its feet after the whole thing sorts itself out, but I guess that is part of the no.3 approach really.

T1 Terry

 

It goes through phases driven in part by our understanding of SARS-CoV-2 and subsequent COVID-19:

1. How to diagnose - initially, there were problems just making a good diagnosis. Worse, the medical staff was exposed and too often short of personal protective gear. So the ER and intensive care staff often became infected and some died. Worse, opportunists lied and . . . some people took fish tank cleaner and died.
2. Supplies and diagnostics appeared - quicker, more accurate diagnosis and supplies meant healthcare hospitals and staff could hold the front lines and start better contact tracing. Absent modern medicine, the at risk people and staff were isolated. There were a lot of false starts.
3. Premature victory - there are claims that we can open up and everyone go to church and work. Churches and work places have become the new hot spots. But there is insufficient testing at the doors to identify who and their social contacts need to be isolated for ~14 days.
4. Future . . . <mega-sigh>

On Sunday, May 24, the calls for "opening up", the 'premature victory' became more strident. So I took this screen shot of the USA daily new cases:

I'm waiting for Sunday, June 7, to take another snapshot.

Exasperating the problem, the murder of George Floyd triggered concentrated crowds protesting and riots. We won't know until the end of June if effective counter measures occur or the USA will achieve 200,000 dead by August and over 300,000 by November.

Bob Wilson

 

i think spain is looking good as well. i read that us cases were less virulent, leading to fewer hospitalizations. sorry, i forget the source.
can a virus 'burn out'?

 

During cremation.

Bob Wilson

 

That is the aim, to keep the spread below 1 new infection from each infected person. The other rather ruthless method is not doing anything and let the virus kill off the weak and create immunity in the strong. Eventually herd immunity develops and the virus runs out of potential carriers because their immune system kills the virus ...... then we get a mutation that doesn't trigger the anti bodies people have built up, and the whole thing starts again.
Will things return to how they were pre pandemic, I doubt it, countries got to see the down side of a global market place so a lot of the manufacturing that went off shore to a cheaper workforce will re-emerge in each country as an essential service industry and get supported by the govt. China will loose an enormous amount of trade and either attempt to increase its base so it can generate the turn over required internally, or the jobs crisis the USA has seen and is partly fuelling the civil unrest there will be repeated in mainland China with devastating consequences. They already have a problem with their aging population, start killing off the young because they are protesting against the ruling party and it won't take long for the whole system to collapse.

T1 Terry

 

Off and on, it does seem like we've heard a lot of that kind of talk, from a certain worldview that imagines there is one kind of 'strength', and it confers magic powers of resistance to a novel virus that no human immune system has seen before. Bolsonaro's comments in Brazil (because of his "history as an athlete", he "would feel nothing") are an example (we've had news about athletes who felt something). There were even some comments in that vein here on PriusChat while the Theodore Roosevelt carrier was in the news (these are sailors who embody our fetishized idea of toughness, so they'll probably need somebody to tell them they're sick).

It seems more likely that a "cull the herd" strategy with a virus new to all human immune systems is going to give you a herd strongly selected for various dimly-understood physiological traits that are lucky when dealing with a particular spiky-looking RNA virus that binds to ACE2 receptors.

The notion that taking that particular selective filter, and applying it massively to your population, gives you at the end anything like a population well-adapted to workforce or society, seems like it could do with a lot more fleshing out.